As a Safety Director for a large Roofing Company that employed over 250 workers, mostly of Hispanic origin, I soon discovered a language barrier that prevented me from effectively communicating safety messages to prevent jobsite accidents.

The language barrier was not the only problem, but also the education level presented another challenge in communicating basic safety rules and regulations to the workers.

Necessity being the mother of invention, helped create a simple idea to assist in bridging the communication gap by developing a method of expressing words with cartoon illustrations that can be visually observed and simply understood at the very same time in two languages.

My invention is a flip sided bilingual Spanish/English illustrated field safety handbook along with a desktop training manual depicting unsafe acts and conditions on roofing jobsites. This concept also creates the opportunity for the English speaking foreman/supervisor to learn technical roofing terms in the Spanish language.

The bilingual field safety handbooks and desk top manuals are used today by many roofing companies to successfully train workers through safety orientations, tail gate safety talks, and to recognize and immediate correct unsafe acts/conditions before an injury or loss occurs by referring to a particular illustration while on the jobsite

All of the information gathered for the contents of the roofer's safety field handbook and desk top safety orientation manual was gathered through actual field experience and through the results of investigating preventable jobsite accidents.

Management will know and understand the basis of safety rules illustrated by the handbooks and desktop manual messages by referring to the reference end notes listed on the back pages of the books. Leading safety authorities, including OSHA, NIOSH, NFPA and NRCA are referenced.